A Con Man's Con Man

The prisoner in the dock at the Palais de Justice in Nice last week was short, pudgy, somewhat shopworn and 50. He looked, as the presiding judge himself remarked, exactly like a smalltown butter-and-cheese merchant. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, small-time about Pierre Aunay. Standing trial on eight separate charges--ranging from jail breaking to cashing phony money orders--Aunay pleaded innocent on all counts. He was, he explained to the court, far too big a crook to have committed such insignificant crimes and far too slick a crook to be caught for the crimes he did commit. Not that the police had not tried. "As Commissaire Benhamou of the Judicial Police once admitted to me," testified Aunay, " 'every time we can't solve a crime, we blame it on you.' "

Little wonder. By his own testimony, Aunay was a virtuoso in crime, equally gifted as a smuggler, counterfeiter, currency manipulator, drug runner and confidence man. He was once the Riviera's major supplier of tax-free cigarettes, which he brought in from Tangier aboard his chartered yacht. He bootlegged gold coins into Algeria by stuffing them into the innards of frozen chickens, cleaned out the numbered Geneva bank account of a wealthy Casablanca doctor by posing convincingly as his brother. Posing on another occasion as a heroin pusher, he conned two U.S. Narcotics Bureau agents into laying a trap for him, and slipped the noose with $12,000 in exchange for several bags of what proved to be merely powdered sugar.

Claustrophobia. Even behind bars, Aunay managed to put his talents to profitable use. Put away in 1962 for a brief term in Paris' Fresnes Prison, he wangled a job in the prison purchasing office, and whiled away his sentence forging $120,000 worth of payment orders for goods the prison never received. During a three-year term for armed robbery in Nice, he suffered a convenient heart attack and wound up living it up in the prison ward of a local hospital. He passed out caviar to his nurses, champagne to his guards, and threw an elaborately catered foie gras party for the whole hospital staff. Then, one night, he staged an equally elaborate escape: after sawing through the bars of his window (to throw police off the track), Aunay put on a fresh suit and walked out the door. Ex plained a hospital guard: "We never locked Monsieur Aunay's door. He suffered from claustrophobia."

The spectacular irregularity of his defense won Aunay the admiration of all of France. Lawyers on the Riviera brought their friends to court to catch a glimpse of him, and Le Figaro, a hard-headed newspaper that is not easily impressed, observed that "Aunay has given a course in swindling." Aunay's judge, unfortunately, was less impressed. He found him guilty on two counts, sent him back to jail for 21 years.

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